What kind of homeschooler are you?

Catie with the Cabbage she grew in her garden

I have been getting a lot of the above question so I took a test at this site:  Click Here

Your Results:

Score for Waldorf Education: -1
Score for Traditional Education: 9
Score for Unit Studies Education: 14
Score for Montessori Education: 23
Score for Thomas Jefferson Education: 15
Score for Unschooling:13

Score for Classical Education: 15
Score for Charlotte Mason Education: 23

 

 

I usually do not go crazy over the results of online tests but this one seems to ALMOST nail me on the head as far as what we have been doing and what we are planning.  My top two were a tie at 23: Montessori and Charlotte Mason.  This makes a lot of sense to me because these tend to be the works that I gravitate to when I am researching.

To learn more about Montessori click here.  I do incorporate this philosophy in that I have seen that Catie learns best when she can get her whole self into the lesson.  Using as many of her senses as possible.  I try to incorporate a lot of hands on activities and materials that she can handle herself.  An example for science would be when we study something off of the Periodic table of elements: 1. We look at and see the atomic number and where it lies within the chart and if it is classified as a solid, liquid or gas.  2. We build a model of the element out of clay, or foam balls and straws or whatever Catie feels like using that day.  3. We do a scavenger hunt and look for things around the house or online that have that element.  4. We do Science experiments, making our own crystals, the chemical reaction when yeast rises in bread, Ivory soap in a microwave, the old fave the mentos in the diet coke. 5. We discuss it with me leading Catie and with her developing the ideas and bringing what she has learned by sight, touch, hearing, smelling, and even tasting (when safe i.e. the bread, or the homemade sugar crystals) around full circle of understanding.  I also allow Catie all the time and repetition she needs to securely cement the lesson for herself.  We do not move on till Catie feels we should move on, and mom must be in agreement.  We did the sugar crystals no less than 5 times.  The Coke and mentos experiment has become a favorite and each time she is able to explain a little more of the chemical reaction that happened.  Catie is very involved in what grade she gets and when it is time to move to the next step or to another topic altogether.  We have also incorporated Montessori into her reading curriculum by her and myself taking turns reading in the novels.  Sometimes broken up by paragraphs and sometimes by each of us playing a character (i.e. reader’s theater style).  We have also had MP3 recordings of the novels and followed along with our fingers on the page while we listened to the recording.  As we progress in each book we make dioramas or shadowboxes of important scenes, dress up in costumes like the characters, and if we come across a food in the book we find a recipe and eat it (Harry Potter is awesome but ButterBeer is gross, lol).  When we finish a novel we watch a movie (if one is available) and note the differences in the movie from the books.  We write diary entries as if we were a character from the book, we sculpt characters and objects from the stories in clay, we paint scenes…………in short every time we read a chapter (and we do a chapter a day in both a History Novel and a Classical Literature novel) we think of something to do that gets our whole self into the story.  In short after I present a subject or source information I allow Catie to explore the subject till she has a full grasp on it.  I am there to be involved and to answer questions and to gently guide the explorations but she is the one that decides what material to make the Carbon atom out of……….she also decides if we are going to make a shadow box or a painting of a scene……..I am just there to introduce the subject, answer questions as they come up then simply enjoy seeing the subject out of the eyes of my child as she leads me through her explorations.  I was a bit hesitant at first but I learned with with a well prepared introductions she only needs some slight guidance from time to time to stay on topic while she is exploring.  I am also being very choosy about which materials I bring into the home classroom.  If I have a choice between a couple of materials then I go with the one that engages the most senses.  I also make sure she has and is aware of as many different choices of exploration as I can possibly supply or come up with.

To learn more about Charlotte Mason method click here.  I love most things about the Charlotte Mason method.  The biggest thing I have incorporated is the manner in which I teach.  When I do my teaching part of the lesson I do so in short, very concentrated bursts.  There are time limits I place on my teaching (and the hard part is making sure that I myself stick to the time limits), i.e. no more than 15-20 minutes of mommy talking or lecturing even when I am using visuals or the blackboard.  After my spurt of teaching she is then given materials to explore the subject on her own (See the Montessori entry).  I also put huge emphasis on getting her outside every day no matter the weather.  I am also making sure that nature study is done each day.  I am also using “living books” to help teach history.  Example of this would be:  I talk about the Great Depression.  Then we look up some pictures online.  Then Catie reads the book “The Babe and I” (a short book about a boy growing up in the depression and finding out his father is unemployed).  Then Catie chooses a Great Depression recipe and she is allowed to make it and taste it.  We also then have conversation about how our family can conserve more and reuse, upcycle, etc and Catie puts out some plans to present at our family meeting that our family will try to follow.  Then she does a project: A journal entry imagining she is a girl growing up in that time: Designing a recycling center in our kitchen, designing a kitchen garden and sketching a plan, making an emergency plan in case we become suddenly in need or homeless.  I also try to keep the afternoons free for her to play and imagine on her own.  Outside hour is a hard must and she plays outside no matter the weather, in addition we have nature lesson every day that happens mostly outside, Catie has excitedly chosen so many topics for this that I have a hard time keeping up with her.  She is required to keep something growing, veggies/fruits, flowers, ferns, ladybugs, caterpillars…………..anything that is alive and growing she is to keep at least one to observe and we talk about it every day. Topics on this have included, what happens in a chrysalis when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly (its actually really gruesome you should look it up), photosynthesis, how plants absorb water and nutrients, why birds fly south for the winter, what a yolk of an egg really is and how it develops when fertilized,  why leaves change color through the seasons, etc.

I did not know much about Thomas Jefferson Education till this test.  To learn more about Thomas Jefferson Education click here.  But I do like their philosophy of using materials other than textbooks and starting with what the child knows and branching out from there.  It seems so much more natural to converse with Catie and guide the conversation than to have her sit there with glazed over eyes while I am trying to stuff tons of facts into her head with no rhyme or reason to it.  Even if the course of conversation does not make much linear sense to me it does to Catie and when she is ready to discuss the topic is when she is most likely to absorb the information and make use of it.  An example will be last night:  I was giving a math problem on the board and explaining how to add and subtract in columns using a method called the “heart method”.  Well from Catie came the comment that human and animal hearts are not actually heart shaped.  So as hard as it was to put down the math lesson I was in the middle of I put down my piece of chalk and turned to my child and said “Really?  Then what shape are they?” and we went over to the art station and she proceeded to draw me a heart shape and a rendition of what our heart organ looks like.  We then looked up some medical pictures with diagrams and actual pictures of heart dissections and discovered that the heart has 4 chambers and found out what each of the chambers does and how blood flows through the heart as the heart muscle beats.  We then went back to the math lesson and finished it but now we call the method the “heart SHAPE method” instead of just the heart method.  Now I feel like if I had told her to save that comment for later and insisted on finishing the math lesson at that time then I would have missed out on the opportunity to expand on the subject of art when she drew her examples, and on science as we continued our exploration.  I also would have probably had a harder time getting the math into her because her mind would have went to the whole shape verses actual organ every time I did the heart shape on the math examples.  I feel like using this method, while making some things a bit longer, makes the whole journey a bit more enjoyable for both of us.  Its like taking the scenic route instead of the direct route when driving to places, we still get there but we saw a lot more stuff and we had a better time on the journey.

Classical Education has tickled my fancy in that it has a very methodical approach to subjects.  To learn more about Classical Education click here.  They also visit and revisit topics till a subject is mastered not just learned.  I feel like this is so much better than just learning till you can pass the test.  We will use testing in our homeschool but the test is more for a measure rather than an endpoint.  A test, in the way we will be using them, is for a measurement of whether we need to continue on this subject in maybe a different type of route or to continue into the next subject, or the higher level of the same subject.  We have not tested yet in our homeschool, it is still early, but even if a test is passed with flying colors I will allow Catie to stay on a subject if she chooses and to add slowly to the subject bit by bit till it is finally mastered.  Practice makes perfect is the model here and I like it.  I need order of some sort or my OCD goes nuts.  I also like their three stage mind process but I think that children can develop faster or slower than the timetable they gave.  I also believe that we all have talents in certain subjects so we can be in the first stage for some subjects and in the second and even the third in others.  So I intend on trying to find where Catie’s mind falls on each subject and building from there.  Since we are in the beginning of our journey this is still very much in the development stage.

Unit studies, I think are wonderful, See Here .  I will be doing a lot of this type of work also.  Why look at sculptures in a book or online when you can go to the museum and see some in person.  When we study WWII we will be going to the WWII museum here in town and there are displays that are interactive and she can even touch and feel.  How could this not be preferable to only seeing it in a book or online.  I also think that if she decides to do a sculpture of a WWII plane, for instance, then not only should she get a mark for History, but Art also, and depending on the sculpture and accompanying diagrams even technology/science.  Now where I will depart from the pure unit study is that we will do some study home at first.  For instance with WWII: At home we will study and fill in our timeline.  We will watch some short movies and study on some of the historical figures at the time, and also discuss the causes of the war and map out allies, axis, and neutral countries.  We will also be reading some novels from the period “Through the Stars” is one “Ten and Twenty” is another, there will be a few more (she is a bit young for some of the concepts in Anne Frank’s Diary but that will be done when we hit WWII again in her older years).  After this back work is done THEN we will go to the museum and do all the interactive work.  After we return from the museum she will be free to choose a project based on this time period.   I think the foundation work will make the interactive displays and experiences mean that much more.

I am not going to give any links for unschooling as it is a widely discussed and very controversial topic for some.  It also have many different caveats of being.  I, obviously, will never be a pure unschooler however I have adopted a few of the philosophies.  I will look for and bookmark learning activities outside of our actual lesson time.  If she perfectly explains the associative property of multiplication to our cat (poor Snicker’s often becomes the student when she “plays” school) then she gets a mark in math.  If the family is making dinner and the 1/2 cup is dirty and she notices that she can use two 1/4 cups to make a 1/2 cup then there is another math mark.  If she points out that the first “star” we see while taking our family evening walk is actually the planet Jupiter and not a star at all then she gets a mark in Science. You get the idea.  I also think that just having conversation everywhere with her is hugely beneficial.  For example, when we go grocery shopping I have a choice of burying my head into my list and my calculator and making sure I am not over budget.  Or I can share with her how I am figuring out what the best deals are so that I do not go over budget.  I can involve her in planning my shopping budget before I even go to the store and I can ask her to decide what the best buy is this week by giving her the calculator and guiding her in how to use it.  Catie and I talk, all the time and constantly, about everything and about nothing.  Silly conversations about imaginary castles in the sky have benefit too.  Many times already we have gotten weird looks from people around us in public for us talking in depth about why they may have chosen an Octagon for the shape of a stop sign instead of another shape, there is no real answer (that I have found) but it is one that we ponder often.  But more often than not I get smiles from people who see me explaining bulk price vs. package price to my child in the store and sometimes even get stopped and told “I wish I could figure out how to do that with my child.”  ( I have not found out the appropriate answer to that yet.)  I get raised eyebrows when I post on facebook pictures of my child cooking or baking bread.  “How can you make her work like that she is only a child”  Hey, its Science class and she love it lol.

The rest of the methods above are either less than 10 or even a minus mark so I am not going to go through them here.  But I thought that this quiz was worth a gander as far as trying to figure out what type of homeschooler to classify myself as.  I often get the question “What method are you using” ……………Heck, I dunno all of them???………..